OUR Space: The New World of Metadata
As requested by conference attendees, here is the presentation at the Industry Symposium at IFLA, 14 August 2008. The presentation describes a new environment of global information services and exciting new roles for metadata and a variety of knowledge organization methods. Argues that the changes in the environment will permanently affect what it means "to catalog" materials for the purpose of connecting citizens, students and scholars to the information they need, when and where they need it.
Karen, thanks for posting the slides! I've already passed the link along to other cataloguers. Thank you again for the wonderful presentation.
Karen,
Thanks for your presentation. How does the OCLC number fit into metadata?
I got the following questions from a publisher friend of mine and wondered if I could get some help.
"Do you know if many publishers are using the OCLC MARC record accession number as part of the metadata for PDF documents they publish online ?
We are thinking of attaching this number to most of our PDF files and were wondering if other publishers were also doing the same. Does OCLC own this number? Would we need your permission to include it in our metadata for a PDF file? Would including it help catalogers do their cataloging easier?
Any thoughts or suggestions you might have would be much appreciated."
Hello Chris,
Sorry for the delayed response; I've been on the road. Thanks to my colleagues Maureen Huss, Cynthia Whitacre, Renee Register, and Tim Savage, who put together the following reply for you.
OCLC is just starting to expand its reach into the publishing community, and presently a few of the publishers with whom we work have sought permission to use OCLC MARC record accession numbers in their print and online catalogs for libraries, but none to-date have sought permission to put the OCLC number in the actual published documents. Some of our vendor partners that participate in our WorldCat Cataloging Partners program also use with permission OCLC control numbers in their online catalogs. There are guidelines for use of OCLC MARC record accession numbers that we can share with your publisher friend and would be happy to provide them. In turn, this publisher would return a signed agreement acknowledging the guidelines for the use of the record numbers.
You also asked if including the MARC record numbers helped catalogers do their cataloging easier and indeed it does. Record numbers provide catalogers with the most efficient way to search and find directly the correct record in WorldCat. OCLC record numbers not only allow catalogers to efficiently find correct records, but other library staff also who use WorldCat for acquisitions and inter-library loan purposes.
Hope this helps. Karen